Mobile devices with communications capability are becoming ubiquitous, the most common being the cell phone and other devices employing cellular radio technology. Many services are being implemented using such devices and many more may be expected as information regarding the location or position of the mobile device becomes readily available through the implementation of location discovery within the mobile radio infrastructure.
One type of service that is emerging is the distribution of local information which is relevant only to a particular narrow geographic location and need only be communicated to people within that location. Such information is usually distributed as a result of a request generated from a mobile device, the request either including the device's location or authorizing the obtaining of the device's location from a location server of the mobile radio infrastructure. The locally-relevant information can also be pushed over the mobile radio infrastructure to mobile devices within a given locality, though the costs of doing so are high. The type of information which it is most desirable to be able to push is information with a certain immediacy to it either because the information will go out of date quickly or because the target audience is transitory. One example is where a theater still has seats available for a show shortly starting, and would like to offer the seats at half price. Another example is information about consumer goods (particularly new products or products under special promotion) which a shop wishes to advertise to consumers passing by.
In view of the cost and complexity of using cellular mobile radio networks to push information, it would be useful to have a different way of distributing local information which has immediacy to it.
A number of technologies exist for the short range communication of information between mobile devices. These technologies include infra-red based technologies and low-power radio technologies (including, in particular, the recent “Bluetooth” short range wireless standard). Depending on the technology implementation, differing types of message propagation will be enabled including asynchronous message broadcast, and multicast and point-to-point duplex connections established after coordination and negotiation between communicating devices.
Such short-range communication systems can be used to communicate information between commercial premises and passers-by provided, of course, the passers-by are equipped with suitable receiving devices. A further restriction on the usefulness of short-range communication devices for sending commercial information to passers-by is that passers-by will generally ignore such information unless they have some expectation that it will be of interest to them; even with this expectation, however, passers-by may well not be bothered to get out their communication device to check whether an incoming message is of interest.
It is known to display on an HTML display terminal a user's display page when the user approaches the terminal—see the paper “Location Aware Mobile Computing”, H. W. Peter Beadle, B. Harper, G. Q. Maguire, J. Judge; Proc. IEEE/IEE International Conference on Telecommunications, (ICT'97), Melbourne, April, 1997. It is also known to push promotions concerning particular shops to the mobile devices of users who are detected as being near the shops and have a profile indicating that they are likely to be interested.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for presenting information to passers-by that overcomes at least some of the foregoing difficulties.